Everyone wants to work at Google — but we found out how 15 ex-Googlers knew it was time to quit

We spoke to former Google employees to find out why they decided to leave the company.

Their answers ranged from frustration with company politics to a desire to take the next step in their career, whether that’s learning new skills, building a new company, or becoming a social-media influencer.

Google is routinely rated one of the best places to work in the US.

It’s no surprise that with a median salary over $160,000, generous benefits packages, and perks like free gourmet food, massages, and music lessons, Google is considered a dream job by so many people in the tech industry.

So why would anyone ever want to leave?

We spoke to several former Googlers to find out why they left the company, compiling their responses with those of other former employees who have written about their departures publicly.

Their reasons include everything from frustration with company politics to simply wanting to feel more freedom at a smaller company. One former Googler even quit to become a social-media influencer.

Read on to see the reasons 15 former Googlers gave for leaving the company.

Liz Wessel, cofounder and CEO of WayUp

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WayUp

Former position at Google: Product marketing manager

Why she left: Wessel told Business Insider she knew it was time to leave Google when she couldn’t stop thinking about her next career move.

“If you can’t do a good job at your job anymore because you’re spending all of your time thinking about another job opportunity, that’s probably a good sign,” she said.

After thousands of employees signed a petition, Google announced it would cease work on the project next year.

“This is obviously a big deal, and it’s very encouraging, but this only happened after months and months of people signing petitions and [internal debate] and people quitting,” Breisacher told Business Insider.

Breisacher said his decision to leave was also influenced by Google’s sponsorship of a conservative political conference and its failure to act decisively after YouTube videos related to LGBT issues were flagged as inappropriate on the site.

“When I started, Google had a reputation as a pro-gay, pro-trans company,” Breisacher, who is gay, told Business Insider. “I guess I’m disillusioned. I know that Google is a for-profit company and you shouldn’t expect it to do things purely for the good of the world. But in the past, we would expect leaders to listen to the employees and to think carefully about issues and not to cross certain lines.

“Things have changed at Google.”

Krystal Bick, social-media influencer

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Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

Former position at Google: Product marketing manager

Why she left: Bick left her six-figure job at Google in 2015 to pursue her side hustle: being a social-media influencer.

She knew it was time to leave after she recognized that influencer marketing was seeing an influx of advertising dollars. Now, she earns as much as four figures for a single sponsored post and five figures for brand ambassadorships.

More importantly, she said, being an entrepreneur is liberating.

“There’s 90% certainty, and there’s 10% of ‘this could really fail miserably, and then I don’t know what I’m going to do,'” Bick told Business Insider. “But I think I was comfortable enough with the fact that even if I fall flat on my face, at least I tried it, and I tried it at a moment where I feel like it really was an opportunity to try it.”

Daren Makuck, software engineer at Qwil

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Facebook/Daren Makuck

Former position at Google: Software engineer

Why he left: Makuck left a high-paying engineering gig at Google and took a 50% pay cut to work at Qwil, a startup that facilitates payments between freelance workers and the companies that hire them.

His previous company, Toro, had been acquired by Google one year earlier, and Makuck said he wanted to work at a smaller company again to feel more ownership of his work. Though he initially didn’t expect Qwil to be a long-term job, a conversation he had with CEO Johnny Reinsch changed his mind.

“He replied, ‘If we can’t keep you happy enough to stay for more than a year, that’s on us,'” Makuck told Business Insider. “This was the first time I had ever felt like a company – not just the people in it – would share the responsibility of my employment, and it’s something I didn’t even realize I needed.”

Libby Leffler, a vice president of SoFi

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Steve Maller

Former position at Google: Account strategist

Why she left: Leffler left Google in 2008 to work at Facebook, and in seven years she worked her way up from a client partner to the manager of strategic partnerships.

But she initially turned down the Facebook job offer, only to realize a few weeks later that it was the right move for her.

She said her chief concern in accepting the client-partner job was her lack of formal sales training.

“This was a great opportunity for me to dive in and see what I could do,” Leffler said. “My instinct at that time was very clear to look for and move into new opportunities where I could learn skills that I wasn’t familiar with.”

Michael Lynch, self-employed software developer

Why he left: Lynch explained in a blog post in February that he left Google because of the company’s frustrating internal politics and the difficulty he experienced trying to get a promotion.

“My career was being dictated by a shifting, anonymous committee who thought about me for an hour of their lives,” he said. “Management decisions that I had no input into were erasing months of my career progress.”

He added: “Worst of all, I wasn’t proud of my work. Instead of asking myself, ‘How can I solve this challenging problem?’ I was asking, ‘How can I make this problem look challenging for promotion?’ I hated that.”

Jose Llorens, head of brand and communications at Drivy

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Jose Llorens

Former position at Google: Creative lead at “The Zoo,” Google’s creative think tank for global brands

Why he left: Llorens left Google in 2016 to write a novel, leaving a job with stable income for one of uncertainty. He wrote and published “Time on Earth” in 2016, and he now works for Drivy, a European car-sharing platform.

Llorens called leaving Google “the biggest decision of my career” and said he was motivated in part because he realized he might never have another chance to follow his dream.

“I remember when I quit my job that some of my older colleagues felt happy for me, but at the same time jealous that they couldn’t do the same because they had families,” Llorens wrote for Business Insider.

“They’d rather be great parents and ensure a stable future to their kids than follow their crazy dreams, which I completely understand. It was now or wait until I retired.”

Ari Paparo, cofounder and CEO of Beeswax

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Beeswax

Former position at Google: Product director, advertising products

Why he left: Paparo left Google in 2010 after two years as an ad executive. He served in leadership positions at Nielsen, AppNexus, and Bazaarvoice before leaving to start an ad-tech company, Beeswax.

He said his decision to leave Google was based on finding the right company culture that would allow him to succeed.

“I saw myself as more of a businessperson than a technologist,” he told Business Insider. “And Google is very much an engineering culture, so there’s a limit to what you can get done as a businessperson.”

Ram Rengaswamy, cofounder and chief technical officer of Beeswax

For Rengaswamy, ending his seven-year stint came down to his desire to build projects from the ground up.

“I kind of knew that I wasn’t growing much at Google,” he told Business Insider. “I mean, yes, there were challenging problems to solve, but there are so many smart people there who’ve done all the heavy lifting that honestly what I felt like I was doing was taking the Lego bricks and just building stuff on top. So someone had already had done the hard work, and for me, I was just putting things together.”

It was a matter of “I’m inquisitive, I’m curious, and I’m not learning enough on my job,” he said.

Shamim Samadi, cofounder and chief product officer of Beeswax

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Courtesy of Beeswax

Former position at Google: Product manager

Why he left: Shamim also left Google to found the startup Beeswax. He said that when he was approached with the idea for Beeswax’s new ad technology, he realized he would have to leave Google if he wanted to help develop it.

“I’d been feeling it in my current role and felt very much that the incumbents would have a hard time pulling it off, and for structural and infrastructure and philosophical reasons just didn’t see it as a real opportunity,” he told Business Insider. “I got really excited about the idea, and then, more importantly, about the team to do it with.”

Michael Peggs, founder and chief content creator of Marccx Media

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Courtesy of Michael Peggs

Former position at Google: New-business development executive

Why he left: Peggs announced in 2014 that he was leaving Google, his home of four years, and posted a memorable YouTube video to share the news.

“Have you ever packed into a subway train during rush hour?” he said. “You walk into the center thinking you’re in the clear, but you’re actually getting pushed and pulled from both sides. You get the better sense to sit down, but you’re packed in so tight that you stand back up. The decision to occupy the door becomes the obvious one, but people hit you on the way out and step over you on the way in. At that moment, the best thing you can do is get off and wait for a less crowded car.”

He added: “That train is your career, and what we all need is room to reevaluate, renew, breathe, stretch, strengthen – to come back and supply the world with our authentic art.”

Christopher Johnson, lead designer at Devbridge Group

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LinkedIn/Christopher Johnson

Former position at Google: Google Meet design lead manager and YouTube Red staff design lead manager

Why he left: Johnson left Google earlier this year after working there for seven years. Though he called Google a “dream job,” he said that having children with his wife made him realize he wanted to leave California to live closer to their families in the Midwest.

“We’ve missed birthdays, holidays, and reunions. It’s hard to develop a deep and meaningful relationship with your grandparents over video chat,” Johnson wrote in a Medium post in May.

He added: “It finally came down to a question of our priorities as a family. How important was this job? Was it so important that we would sacrifice the family relationships for the money, security, and benefits? Did I believe that I would never be able to find a fulfilling job outside of Google?

“The answers to these questions are incredibly personal and they will vary greatly for different people. But for my wife and I, 10 years in California was enough and we wanted to come back home. So we did.”

Falon Fatemi, founder and CEO of Node

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Twitter/Falon Fatemi

Former position at Google: Strategic partnerships developer

Why she left: Fatemi said she left Google because she felt as if she was settling for a comfortable job that hindered her growth.

“Just a couple of years in, I realized something was wrong: I wasn’t learning anymore,” she wrote for Forbes in 2016. “I had plateaued. As Google grew and roles became more specialized, I found myself doing the same tasks every day. I knew objectively that I was still making an impact, but it was one that I couldn’t really feel.

“I thought, ‘Is this the best it gets? Have I hit my peak already?'”

Alex Feinberg, director of business development at OKCoin

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Screenshot/Tech Republic

Former position at Google: Strategic partner development manager

Why he left: Feinberg left his six-year job at Google behind in June to work in a development role at OKCoin, a cryptocurrency exchange.

He wrote in a blog post that he realized that his desire to get promoted at Google conflicted with his desire to grow professionally.

“I came to believe that I had ascended to a point in my Google career where I could no longer expect to get promoted if my main priority was learning and personal development,” Feinberg wrote in his blog post.

“I observed that unlike my most commercially successful friends, the most rewarded Google business employees seemed to have personality traits that tilted strongly towards absorbing the fears of their superiors. Having experienced significant anxiety as a professional athlete who worried how he would be evaluated by management, I believed this to be a maladaptive trait for me to enhance - one that would limit my chances of achieving something truly spectacular in life.”

YK Sugi, YouTuber

Why he left: Sugi left his six-figure job at Google in 2017 to make educational videos for his YouTube channel.

Sugi wrote in a Medium post that when he first started making videos, “being able to help so many people and getting positive feedback from them just felt awesome.”

It was then that he decided to transition into a full-time YouTube career.

“I’m making a lot less money now, but it’s just amazing to be able to directly see the impact that I’m making on people’s lives,” he wrote. “This was actually something that was sort of lacking in my engineering job, even though working at Google was amazing.”